Mother Jones illustration; Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call/Getty
This story was originally published by The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. Sign up for its newsletters here.
Last December, the Department of Justice opened a new office in its Civil Rights Division called the Second Amendment Section. The goal of the office, as previously reported by Mother Jones and The Trace, is to identify firearm restrictions enacted by cities and states that the administration believes to be unconstitutional—and sue to overturn them.
And sue they have.
In the section’s first six months of operation, the Justice Department has brought cases against police departments in Los Angeles County and the Virgin Islands, the city of Denver, the state of Colorado, and the nation’s capital, Washington, DC. Virginia may be next: Minutes after Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed an assault weapon ban last month, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon posted on X, “See you in court!”
“It’s great to have that giant 800-pound gorilla in the room with us.”
The Civil Rights Division typically fights for the disempowered by enforcing federal anti-discrimination statutes. It was created in 1957 to ensure Black voting rights and school desegregation. Gun rights “have never been a focus,” said Megan Marks, a former attorney in the division who is now deputy director and managing editor of Red Line for Civil Rights, a nonprofit initiative that tracks the politicization of civil rights enforcement under President Donald Trump.
Not surprisingly, pro-gun organizations are thrilled with the Civil Rights Division’s new direction. “It’s great to have that giant 800-pound gorilla in the room with us,” said Kostas Moros, director of legal research and education for the Second Amendment Foundation, which has more than 50 active lawsuits seeking to void gun laws across the country. “Because courts, like it or not, do take the DOJ more seriously. And frankly it’s nice to have the DOJ at least seeing the Second Amendment as equal to all the other rights.”
The DOJ’s suits come at a time when the Trump administration has departed from more traditional civil rights issues—discrimination against marginalized groups based on race, sex, disability, and religion—by pursuing conservative policies, reshaping DEI initiatives, investigating “reverse discrimination,” and suing universities over affirmative action practices.
“Under the leadership of President Trump, this is the most pro-Second Amendment Department of Justice in history,” a Justice Department spokesperson told me. “We are committed to maximizing law-abiding citizens’ ability to fully exercise their right to bear arms and evenhandedly enforcing federal laws that do not infringe on Second Amendment rights.”
The flurry of litigation began last September, when the Civil Rights Division filed suit against the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department over “unreasonable delays” in issuing concealed carry permits that allegedly stretched “as far as two years.” Six weeks later the division sued the police department in the Virgin Islands, a US territory, over “unreasonable delays” in its gun permitting process and requirements like bolted-in gun safes. Shortly after, the territory’s governor proposed laws establishing a 90-day deadline for approving or denying permits. The division then began targeting bans on semiautomatic rifles and high-capacity magazines, first in Washington, DC, in December, then in Colorado in May.
Some experts and veteran civil rights attorneys said they are troubled by the Justice Department’s new direction. “The history of racial discrimination in the US is this deep scar, while gun rights were never really under assault in a country that has more guns than people,” said John Donohue, a law professor at Stanford University. He said the Second Amendment Section is unnecessary because an army of well-funded pro-gun groups “are constantly bringing litigation.” He also pointed to the financial burden for states and municipalities that will have to spend money defending their laws in court.
For decades, the National Rifle Association and allied groups have successfully waged legislative and legal campaigns to loosen firearm regulations across the country. They argue gun ownership is an innate human right—one that’s constantly under attack. These days most states allow gun owners to carry a concealed weapon in public without a permit, and many even prevent municipalities from restricting the practice.
Marks, who spent nine years probing police misconduct in the Civil Rights Division before leaving in 2025, is concerned that the division is abdicating its responsibility to investigate serious law enforcement abuses in favor of instead “making AR-15s more accessible.” One of the key federal statutes that Marks and her colleagues enforced was passed after Rodney King was beaten by Los Angeles police in 1991. It authorized investigations to determine whether law enforcement agencies have engaged in a “pattern or practice” of civil rights violations, including excessive force or racial profiling.
The DOJ’s new Second Amendment Section is now utilizing that same language from the statute, but repurposing its meaning to “investigate law enforcement agencies that engage in a pattern or practice of infringing on law-abiding citizens’ 2nd Amendment rights.” That trade-off, experts said, comes with a cost.
“What we’ve seen play out is the department walking away from a number of completed investigations where they found systemic misconduct,” said Marks, referring to the traditional cases the Civil Rights Division has more typically pursued in the past. By focusing on gun rights, she said, “the department is walking away from its responsibilities to marginalized communities.”
Moros, of the Second Amendment Foundation, disagrees, pointing to a historical analogue for the Trump DOJ’s view that gun rights are a key component of civil rights. After the Civil War, he notes, the War Department established The Freedmen’s Bureau, a temporary division created essentially to stabilize the South and to protect the rights of formerly enslaved people. Among other things, the bureau helped formerly enslaved people become self-sufficient—and argued for their right to own guns. “I do think it’s a very clear precedent, because they stood up for people who the state and local governments were trying to disarm,” Moros said. “This is definitely something the federal government has taken an interest in in the past.”
Donohue, the law professor, rejects that argument, adding that the gun rights movement has a long history of co-opting the language of civil rights. The NRA, for example, describes itself as “America’s longest-standing civil rights organization” without a hint of irony.
Former employees of the Civil Rights Division told Mother Jones and The Trace last fall that the revered unit had been co-opted by the Trump administration “to serve an agenda that is in some ways antithetical to civil rights.” In December, more than 100 former DOJ civil rights attorneys and staff published a letter warning of the destruction of the division, citing the retirement or removal of 5,000 career attorneys from the department overall. The new focus on guns is just another example of how the division has been repurposed to fulfill the administration’s ideological objectives, said Marks.
Marks said she hopes that if the next administration disbands the Second Amendment Section, the Civil Rights Division can return to its original focus of fighting for the disempowered. But she said it will take time. “I think it’s a question of, can they rebuild the resources? Can they ensure and reestablish norms like independent enforcement by career experts? So many of those guardrails are gone now. I don’t know that it can happen overnight.”
